









































24

Technical Services
Brinna Michael, Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Chair 

MEMBERS PRESENT

• Brinna Michael, Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, 
Chair

• Leslie Engelson, Murray State University
• Heather Hicks, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Christa Strickler, University of Notre Dame
• Christina Torbert, University of Mississippi
• Alexis Weiss, Atla, Atla Funnels Coordinator
• Seth Miskimins, Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist 

University
• Anna Appleman, Columbia Theological Seminary
• Becky Givins, Covenant Theological Seminary
• John Vinke, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
• Stephanie Garrett, Catholic International University
• Jeff Brigham, Andover Newton Theological School
• Tim Hasin, Molloy University
• W. Field, William Booth College

ABSENTEE MEMBERS

• Michael Bradford, Wayne State University
• Bro. Andrew Kosmowski, North American Center for 

Marianist Studies, Secretary
• Armin Siedlecki, Pitts Theology Library, Emory University

AGENDA 

1) Steering Committee Reminders
a) A reminder of the current Steering committee members
b) Call for nominations (self or otherwise) to fill two 

vacancies



Interest Group Reports  25

2) Liaison Reports
a) See “Round Robin Reports” below.

3) TCB Report
a) See “Round Robin Reports” below.

4) TSIG Year in Review
a) See “Year in Review” below.

5) Open Discussion

YEAR IN REVIEW

TSIG has had a quiet year. Updates to the membership scope as 
discussed and approved at the 2023 business meeting were final-
ized and the website was updated to reflect those changes. The new 
membership scope expands and explicitly invites those working in a 
broad range of technical services roles beyond cataloging to join. A 
proposal writing workshop was held this winter with the support of 
the conference planning committee. The workshop provided a review 
of proposal writing, types of sessions, and the submission process.

ROUND ROBIN REPORTS 

CC:DA – Report written by Michael Bradford, delivered by Brinna 
Michael.

Upon the retirement of Donna Wells, a year ago, the position of 
Atla Liaison to CC:DA (ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description 
& Access) was left vacant until spring 2024.

For the 2023/2024 year, Michael served as an Intern/non-voting 
member of CC:DA. His role was to help take the minutes of the meet-
ings, held at Midwinter and Annual.

This spring, there was a call for volunteers on the TSIG Listserv 
to stand for election as the new Atla Liaison. As no others stepped 
forward, Michael was named to the position.

As of July 1st, in addition to being the Atla Liaison, he is also a full-
voting member of the committee.

For this last year:



26    ANNUAL Y E ARBOOK

CC:DA responded to requests for comments by the RDA Steering 
Committee on the following proposals:

• ReligionsWG/2023/1
• ReligionsWG/2023/2
• LanguagesWG/2023/1
• PlacesWG/2023-2

The Committee has a Procedures Task Force that has been revis-
ing the documentation and manual that governs the committee and 
will be ready for approval by Core Leadership and ratification by 
the committee this summer.

The Documents Online Repository Task Force was charged last 
summer with identifying a permanent online repository and locat-
ing historical committee documents spread around online and in 
local files, and to determine a retention cycle.

The CC:DA Task Force on Personal Names in Official RDA was 
charged in Sept. 2023 with submitting a proposal to the North 
American RDA Committee (NARDAC) with revising the instructions 
on personal names. An interim report is expected by ALA Annual.

During the Midwinter Meeting, the committee receives 
reports from various communities, such as NARDAC, OCLC, 
and PCC. The complete minutes for Winter 2024 is here: https://
connect.ala.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.
ashx?DocumentFileKey=bcf43395-542d-826b-a0b6-5b0798935781. 

Michael was unable to attend the ALA Annual Meeting on June 
29th and July 1st.

On July 1st, Michael sent an email to the TSIG listserv requesting 
quick turnaround feedback/comments on the new RDA proposal 
for: RSC/ReligionsWG/2024/1, which proposes to change the word 
“church” to “place of worship,” and moves the instructions for some 
religious bodies to either a general corporate heading rule or to a 
community resource area, as they deal with a specific religion only.

Atla PCC Funnels – Reported by Alexis Weiss.

• SACO Funnel

https://www.rdatoolkit.org/rsc/rscreligionswg20231
https://www.rdatoolkit.org/rsc/rscreligionswg20232
https://www.rdatoolkit.org/rsc/rsclanguageswg20231
https://www.rdatoolkit.org/rsc/rscplaceswg20232
https://connect.ala.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=bcf43395-542d-826b-a0b6-5b0798935781
https://connect.ala.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=bcf43395-542d-826b-a0b6-5b0798935781
https://connect.ala.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=bcf43395-542d-826b-a0b6-5b0798935781


Interest Group Reports  27

 ᵒ Producing proposals fairly well, due in large 
part to the addition of the Atla Metadata team 
as official members of the funnel

• NACO Funnel

 ᵒ Numbers are down from previous years, 
largely due to the departure of Richard 
Lammert (previous PCC Funnels coordinator)

 ᵒ Anna Appleman and Heather Hicks have volun-
teered to help move funnel members who are 
not currently independent through that process 
by reviewing work

• PCC Operations Committee

 ᵒ Agenda and recordings: https://www.loc.
gov/aba/pcc/documents/OpCo-2024/Agenda-
OpCo-2024.pdf 

 ᵒ These meetings are open to all, so if you are 
interested in attending the meeting virtually 
next May, contact Alexis for more information.

 ᵒ Reminder to join the PCC mailing list if you are 
interested in keeping up to date on PCC: http://
www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/discussion.html 

 ᵒ SACO Updates:
 ‐ There is a large project ongoing to modern-

ize many headings, specifically floating 
headings.
• e.g., “Christianity and Buddhism” 

is being deleted in favor of 
“Christianity—Relations—Buddhism”

• e.g., “Democracy and Christianity” is 
being deleted in favor of “Christianity—
Political aspects” and “Democracy”

 ‐ A large project to update headings related 
to Indigenous peoples and topics

 ‐ Atla has been involved in work to change/
remove/update the term “Cults”

• NACO Updates:

https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/OpCo-2024/Agenda-OpCo-2024.pdf 
https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/OpCo-2024/Agenda-OpCo-2024.pdf 
https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/OpCo-2024/Agenda-OpCo-2024.pdf 
http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/discussion.html  
http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/discussion.html  


28    ANNUAL Y E ARBOOK

 ᵒ Upcoming NACO training is tentatively sched-
uled for September

 ᵒ Paul Frank has retired, and Tricia Mackenzie 
has taken over his role as liaison for NACO to 
the Library of Congress 

TCB: Technical Services in Religion & Theology – Reported by 
Christa Strickler. It has been an exciting and challenging year for 
TCB. First, the editorial board has been expanded from an Editor 
in Chief and two Editors to include an additional Editor. Nicholas 
Friesner joined the editorial board in early fall to fill that additional 
role. Nicholas brings a wealth of editorial experience and has been a 
critical part of the team as the publication develops. Also, TCB pub-
lished the first themed issue on system migrations which attracted 
much interest from readers. Staffing changes at Atla Open Press 
have posed some challenges, including the departure of Christine 
Fruin and the upcoming departure of Christy Karpinski. The editorial 
board is also experiencing turnover as Christa Strickler steps down 
as Editor in Chief and Anna Appleman finishes her terms as Editor. 
Andy Sulavik, the Technology and Collections Services Librarian at 
Manatee County Public Library, will be joining the editorial board as 
the new Editor in Chief, and Tim Hasin, Head of Technical Services 
at Molloy University, will be joining as Editor.

OTHER

During the open discussion at the business meeting, members raised 
several points of discussion, summarized below.

Leslie Engelson put forward a request for members to nominate 
themselves for upcoming Atla Board positions as Armin Siedlecki’s 
term ends this year and Leslie’s term ends next year. Currently, Leslie 
and Armin are the only technical services representatives on the 
Board, and it would be nice to continue to have representation. For 
those interested in nominating themselves, contact Susan Ebertz on 
the Nominating Committee.

• Christa Strickler followed up with a question about 
Board service requiring in-person attendance at 
meetings four times a year.



Interest Group Reports  29

 ᵒ Leslie clarified that the Board meets three 
times a year: in person at Atla Annual in June, 
in person in October, and online in February 
(starting 2026).

 ᵒ The reasoning for having at least two required 
in-person meetings is that previous experience 
during COVID with all virtual meetings has 
shown to be less productive, less conducive to 
building rapport between Board members, and 
overall unpleasant to spend so many hours on 
video calls.

 ᵒ Leslie added that all costs of travel, housing, 
and food are covered by Atla for Board mem-
bers for these required in-person meetings.

 ᵒ Christina Torbert added that there are special 
provisions for Board members needing to have 
a hybrid option for attending meetings, for 
example, those living internationally.

• Brinna Michael asked about the length of a Board 
term.

 ᵒ Leslie shared that Board members are elected 
to a three-year term which can be renewed 
once, if reelected.

• Leslie Engelson asked for thoughts or advice on 
matching vendor records to OCLC records and hav-
ing those vendor records updated with the corre-
sponding OCLC number.

 ᵒ Brinna Michael mentioned that Emory 
Libraries has recently undertaken OCLC’s 
reclamation service, but Leslie is hoping for an 
ongoing process rather than a one-time project.

 ᵒ Christa Strickler mentioned Notre Dame is 
doing the OCLC data sync process.

• Christina Torbert asked for thoughts on writing 
functional requirements for a request for proposal 
from subscription agents.



30    ANNUAL Y E ARBOOK

 ᵒ Leslie Engleson asked if this process has ever 
resulted in a change in vendor, which Christina 
confirmed has happened before.

 
Brinna Michael prompted attendees to consider sharing topics 
they are interested in learning more about, tools they’d like to see 
demonstrated, a particular person’s work they’d like to learn more 
about, etc. The goal is to gather possible ideas for programming 
during the coming year as well as potential presentation topics for 
Atla Annual 2025.

• Leslie Engelson is interested in learning about prac-
tical applications of AI in technical services work.

 ᵒ She has used AI prompts to help automate 
reformatting of table of contents information.

 ᵒ Brinna suggested perhaps having a two-part 
session: discussion about applications and then 
hands-on testing/exploring.

• Christa Strickler mentioned that she might propose 
a session on cleaning up eResource bibliographic 
records.

 ᵒ Heather Hicks asked about how Christa has 
approached clean-up projects previously, spe-
cifically what tools she used.

 ᵒ Christa mentioned that a good deal of Notre 
Dame’s electronic resource metadata man-
agement happens through OCLC’s Collection 
Manager. They make a great deal of local 
changes using MarcEdit, but noted that many 
of those local changes are likely to be lost in an 
upcoming system migration. Christa added that 
she prefers working directly in OCLC to avoid 
that issue.

 
Leslie Engelson asked about thoughts on the recent PCC RDA train-
ing and whether it was helpful for implementing new RDA and/or 
the new toolkit.



Interest Group Reports  31

• There was consensus that new RDA is challenging to 
understand, particularly the new concepts (nomen, 
res, etc.).

• Leslie mentioned that the training did help her 
understand the structure of the new toolkit.

• Becky Givins and Heather Hicks discussed their 
experiences with attempting to implement old RDA 
in the midst of system migrations.

• Brinna Michael suggested a discussion group to try 
and work through new RDA together.

• Becky asked for thoughts on the usefulness of the 
toolkit for producing NACO records.

W. Field asked if anyone had experience using Microsoft Sharepoint/
Teams in conjunction with the library catalog for discoverability 
purposes.

• John Vinke discussed the possibility of permissions 
management and how that might be a challenge for 
resources that should be openly accessible.


